Okta, Deloitte, and Verizon experts discuss how technology enables a safe and collaborative future of work.

“People want to come to the office to engage and collaborate,” Antar said at Insider’s recent virtual event, “How Emerging Technologies Influence the Future of Work,” on Thursday, January 5.

“The reason we have retention issues is that people don’t feel connected to the company that they work for because many, many employees haven’t even met their coworkers,” Antar explained. “As a result, the location has become a place to bond and create meaning.”

Paayal Zaveri, a senior tech reporter at Insider, spoke with Antar and other future-of-work experts and business leaders about how technology enables the future of work in a safe and collaborative way at this hour-long event surrounding CES 2022, presented by Lenovo in partnership with Verizon.

According to Vijay Paulrajan, vice president of devices at Verizon Business Group, employee expectations are increasing as the pace of consumer change and innovation accelerates.

“Something we’re starting to hear from our customers is that they want to invest in technologies not just for providing customer benefits, but also for employee purposes,” he said.

“While we monitor the economic environment, I fully anticipate — especially as 5G wireless technologies are deployed further and faster — that there will be some new exciting use cases that we will go after and solve for our customers with unique solutions.”

According to Steve Hatfield, a Deloitte global future-of-work leader and principal, businesses must consider whether technologies and workplace designs were designed for physical spaces that have been transformed into remote environments.

“The average knowledge worker will waste about 32 days a year doing things like switching between desktop apps or saving lost work,” he said.

According to Hatfield, one key advantage of the new digital environment is that talent can be found anywhere.

“It changes the conversation about who your workforce is,” he says. “How do we consider the various talent models that can bring different players to the fore to get things done when you need them, and source the skills you need as you need them?”

Prior to the pandemic, about 4% of the US workforce was remote or hybrid; now, it’s close to half of the population, according to Hatfield. It is expected that up to 25% of the global workforce will continue to work remotely in some capacity.

“The average engineer, for example, spends 70% of her time looking for data. The average nurse spends 50% of her or his time trying to do administration. The question becomes how we can bring technologies to the table to elevate what humans do while eliminating some of the work underneath “He stated.